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2005-2006 Workshops

Politics of Action

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Schedule

Faculty Coordinators:

Graduate Student Coordinator(s):


Description

Building on our 2003-2004 Mellon Workshop, "The Politics of Action: Art in the Public Sphere," our focus this year will be on what we will call the "theatre of life." Here we will be concerned with the conceptual and political border between performance and daily life. In keeping with the interdisciplinary focus of our workshop, we will pursue scholarship that has worried over the border between performance and life from the 1960s on. The work of Alan Kaprow, Linda Montano, Tehching Hsieh, Andy Warhol, and Ronald Reagan in the United States called into question the distinction between the place of performance and the place of the real in everyday life. Theorists and scholars such as Herbert Blau, Richard Schechner, Elizabeth LeCompte, Amelia Jones, Rebecca Schneider, and Peggy Phelan have addressed these issues in their writing and performances. Non-US contexts are also central to the work we will investigate and we plan to host scholars and artists working in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere.

We envision a lively participatory seminar that will provide a forum for informed and engaged discussion about graduate student and faculty research. There will be an opportunity for some participants to present papers to the workshop, but we will also be inviting outside guest scholars and artists throughout the year. The seminar will allow us to look more carefully at what the relationships between art and life (in particular, visual art, theatricality, political action and ideology) are in the new century. What is the theatricality of everyday life, and the political dimension of everyday action? This is the terrain of the next generation of Humanities scholars and this workshop aspires to create a stimulating forum where emerging scholars can take an active role in shaping the key interdisciplinary questions that will inform their future work and the hybrid fields they pioneer.